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Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, May 27th where Andrew Parsons will build a simple 2D shooter game for Windows and Xbox 360 in an hour from start to finish, and hear how you can do the same thing with the tools already at your disposal not just for Windows and Xbox but also the upcoming Windows Phone 7.

• TOPIC:   XNA Game Development – with Andrew Parsons
• DATE:    Thursday, May 27th, 5:30pm – 7:00pm
• VENUE:  Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:    Free. All welcome

Andrew Parsons is the Academic Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Australia which means he gets to travel the country talking to students about cool technology – stuff like Xbox, Windows Phone, cool dev stuff, tips and tricks with Office, PhotoSynth, Pivot and more. Combining his 15 years as a professional developer and 8 years as a professional games journalist prior to joining Microsoft, his passion for video game development has seen an outlet through XNA.

Update: although this works, it makes VS2010 open really slowly…

There does not seem to be an installer for VS2010. You can install the VS2008 version of CopySourceAsHtml (from here), and then manually edit the CopySourceAsHtml.AddIn file located at C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Addins so that both Version elements are set to 10.0:

<?xml version=“1.0“ encoding=“utf-8“ standalone=“no“?>

<Extensibility xmlns=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/AutomationExtensibility“>

<HostApplication>

<Name>Microsoft Visual Studio Macros</Name>

<Version>10.0</Version>

</HostApplication>

<HostApplication>

<Name>Microsoft Visual Studio</Name>

<Version>10.0</Version>

</HostApplication>

<Addin>

<FriendlyName>CopySourceAsHtml</FriendlyName>

<Description>Adds support to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 for copying source code, syntax highlighting, and line numbers as HTML.</Description>

<Assembly>JTLeigh.Tools.Development.CopySourceAsHtml, Version=3.0.3215.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=bb2a58bdc03d2e14, processorArchitecture=MSIL</Assembly>

<FullClassName>JTLeigh.Tools.Development.CopySourceAsHtml.Connect</FullClassName>

<LoadBehavior>1</LoadBehavior>

<CommandPreload>0</CommandPreload>

<CommandLineSafe>0</CommandLineSafe>

</Addin>

</Extensibility>

I recently needed to get all files in a folder hierarchy, so I quickly wrote the following C# snippet:

List<string> files = FindMatchingFilesRecurse(startFolder, "*.txt");

… 

public List<string> FindMatchingFilesRecurse(string folder, string filePattern)

{

    List<string> fileList = new List<string>();

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(folder))

    {

        FindMatchingFilesHelper(folder, filePattern, fileList);

    }

    return fileList;

}

private void FindMatchingFilesHelper(string folder, string filePattern, List<string> list)

{

    list.AddRange(Directory.GetFiles(folder, filePattern));

    foreach (string dir in Directory.GetDirectories(folder))

    {

        FindMatchingFilesHelper(dir, filePattern, list);

    }

}

But .NET 4.0 now contains the same functionality in a single method call (and as a bonus, it’s approximately 20-30% faster!):

List<string> files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(startFolder, "*.txt", SearchOption.AllDirectories).ToList();

In a recent post, Securing your application. Part 1 – Securing your connection, Brian Madsen talks about encrypting your database connection string, but fails to mention that using this technique does not stop passing unencrypted passwords over the network to your database server.

Whenever possible, you should use Windows authentication instead of SQL authentication to connect from your ASP.NET application to your database server. You should still consider encrypting your connection string to protect server connection details, such as the server and database name.

For ASP.NET 2.0 applications, you should store connection strings in the <connectionStrings> section of your application’s web.config file. The connection string used with Windows authentication must include either the Trusted_Connection=Yes attribute, or the equivalent attribute Integrated Security=SSPI, as shown here.

  <add name="MyDbConn1" 
       connectionString="Server=MyServer;Database=MyDb;Trusted_Connection=Yes;"/>
  <add name="MyDbConn2" 
      connectionString="Initial Catalog=MyDb;Data Source=MyServer;Integrated Security=SSPI;"/>
 
  

The above two strings are equivalent and both result in Windows authentication to the database.

Ref.: How To: Connect to SQL Server Using Windows Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, May 6th for a presentation on Code Contracts. With Framework 4.0, Code Contracts are now a reality. In this session, we’ll look first at what Code Contracts are, and then demonstrate how to use them in Framework 4.0 to write more robust, concise and better-documented code. We’ll also look under the covers on how they work, and see how to tailor contract behaviour for development, deployment, legacy and unit testing environments.

• TOPIC:   Code Contracts in Framework 4.0 – with Joe Albahari
• DATE:    Thursday, May 6th, 5:30pm – 7:00pm
• VENUE:  Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:    Free. All welcome

Joe Albahari is author of O’Reilly’s C# 4.0 in a Nutshell. He’s a regular user group speaker and has presented at TechEd and JAOO.

There will be door prizes of: 2 copies of ‘C# 4.0 in a Nutshell’ and a LINQPad license courtesy of Joe Albahari, plus a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA).

Arrive early if you want a seat!

This event is happening tomorrow:

In this session, Greg will describe the improvements to reporting services coming in the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 R2. Greg will explore general reporting enhancements, changes to report viewer, report builder and report manager, the introduction of map data, shared components and shared data sources.

• Venue: Level 15, 191 St Georges Terrace (Parmelia House, Fujitsu Office)
• Time:   5:30pm – 7:00pm
• Date:   Thurs, 22nd April 2010

To register for the session: http://www.sqlserver.org.au/Events/RegisterMeeting.aspx?EventId=463

ReSharper 5.0 is available for download as Release Candidate, with a release date in the near future.

What’s New in ReSharper 5.0

1. Web Development. Extended toolset available to ASP.NET developers when working with markup files and web site infrastructure.
2. Project and Team. View, change and maintain project structure.
3. Support for Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 are also supported.
4. Code Analysis. This area incorporates several improvements, from “plainly” implementing a substantial pack of new code inspections to upgrading foreach and for loops to LINQ queries and letting you track how data values and method calls are passed through your code.
5. Performance optimizations in many areas, especially search for usages, navigation, and refactorings.
6. Improvements in localization, C# 4, VB 10, XAML, and ASP.NET support.
7. Fixes and improvements in VS2010 integration.

Other enhancements include extended IntelliSense, bookmarking, and native NUnit support.

Note: All ReSharper 4.5 new or upgrade purchases made since October 15, 2009 qualify for a free upgrade to ReSharper 5.0V

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, April 8th where Jake Ginnivan will build an application from the ground up using VSTO. Microsoft Office offers a platform that provides many possibilities for application development using managed code. In this talk Jake will describe what VSTO is, why to choose it as a platform and how you can build a successful application from the ground up. In addition, he will cover the pitfalls of COM Interop, ways to avoid performance and memory issues, structuring your solution to enable it to be fully unit testable, the common extensibility areas of outlook, using WPF as your presentation platform within Outlook, deployment using ClickOnce, dealing with ClickOnce update issues and the patterns you can use to make it all fit together. To demonstrate these techniques, Jake has built an Outlook add-in using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, which synchronises his Facebook events list into Outlook.

• TOPIC:  Developing Office Add-Ins with VSTO in Visual Studio 2010
• DATE:   Thursday, April 8th, 5:30pm – 7:00pm
• VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:   Free. All welcome

If you have a game from Bioware or EA (Such as Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age) and you are having trouble accessing the in-game downloadable content (you get the unhelpful message “you are not connected to the internet”), the tech support help is a bit hit and miss! Somehow, the manual is missing magic port numbers and tech support don’t tell you about it.

You must unblock ports 80 (TCP/UDP), 8000 (TCP), 8001 (UDP), 443 (TCP), and 18081 (TCP) to access the downloadable content.
[18081 isn’t listed in the manual or on the website, but the game tries to contact an EA server on that port. 443 isn’t listed either, but that’s a regular https port and is most likely unblocked on most systems.]

If that doesn’t work for you, download and install WireShark, fire up the game and see what port accesses are being attempted.

This is a bit off-topic but I know a lot of developers like to play games (and why not, after all that’s what computers are for!)

If you buy and download games via Steam using the Steam client, you can do this so that the downloaded content does not add to your download limit (i.e. as an unmetered download). Why use Steam? Well, games are often cheaper than the shelf price, you can get pre-release content, and they often have great specials on older games.

The precise details will vary slightly depending on your location and which ISP you are with. The instructions here will be for Australia and Telstra, but they will work for other ISPs such as iinet and westnet etc. I’ll note the points at which you will need specific information.

Step 1: Download and install the Steam Client. You obviously need to do this if you want to use this service!

• You will obviously need to create an account if you wish to purchase games through Steam.
• After installing the Steam client, you will need to opt in to the beta client program (to get the version that allows changing the preferred content server).
• * Goto View->Settings->Downloads and set your download region to ‘Australia – NSW (Telstra)’

NOTE: If you are with another ISP, then this needs to be set accordingly (for westnet use ‘Australia – WA (3FL)’, not sure about others. Contact your ISP). NOTE: just performing this step alone won’t guarantee content is downloaded unmetered.

• You may have to delete (or rename) the ClientRegistry.blob file located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam and log back in again.
• Exit Steam.

Step 2: Download and install SteamWatch 3 (ignore the fact that the page title is SteamWatch 2!). Choose the GameArena servers (doesn’t really matter as we will be editing the config anyway)

• SteamWatch watches process ‘Steam’ on port 27030 and blocks all access except to those IP address contained in it’s ‘white list’. We need to use SteamWatch because just setting a preferred content server (in the step above) does not prevent Steam deciding to use other servers as well as/or instead of your preferred server.
• Right-click the SteamWatch tray icon and select ‘Edit SteamWatchSettings.xml’
• * Change the list of allowed Steam content server IP addresses to (NOTE: this will obviously depend on your ISP):
203.39.198.167
203.39.198.168

NOTE: The 3FL content server IP addresses are

steam-wa.3fl.net.au – 202.72.191.174
steam-nsw.3fl.net.au – 202.173.128.178

Then re-start Steam. It’s best to start a download and then pause it and then check to make sure the download is unmetered.

[One thing to note; the local Steam server obviously has to have the content on it. Also, you may find that connections are more reliable at off-peak times.]

I also added the following ports to my router’s firewall:

• 27000-27050 TCP
• 4380 TCP